A small drive with a big memory.
2.5in Harddrives are the mainstay of the mobile computing world right now, packing a lot of storage space into a small area. However, as part of a tradeoff, you can't have everything that a desktop drive has. Perhaps the most noticeable omission here is the speed reduction from the standard 7200RPM to a more sedate 5400RPM. This means that since the platters themselves are spinning slower, accessing information from them should also be slower.
While not exactly rocket surgery, this does mean that a smaller drive like this is going to be slower - but that isn't always a bad thing. Slower rotation also means significantly less vibration noise and heat, and this one was hard to hear in a quiet room while barely becoming noticeably warm. Access time was 18.3ms, and burst speed an impressive 229MB/s, but sustained read topped out at 67.6MB/s. This is more than enough to stream video and music, but compared to performance-oriented drives it's not quite as good.
It handled copying the Crysis install folder well, hitting an average 105MB/s write speed - though when copying the Program Files folder it hit only 47MB/s write. So it's not the fastest drive, but it's darn quiet and has a pretty huge amount of storage space; but what would you use this for (other than a laptop)?
The answer is that it'd be a great choice for a media centre, or even part of a case mod. Thanks to its huge data density and small size it can be whacked almost anywhere, or even two of them crammed into the same space as a single 3.5in drive. RAID1 on two of these would be an easy and relatively cheap way of offering data redundancy for all your media and pr0ns you can't lose, making this little drive very versatile. At 3.36GB/dollar, this is a decent choice for small-form-factor storage.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012